


Candles

by RowboatCop



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Coulson and his ridiculous crush on Skye, Gen, Skye Feels, Skye backstory, Skye's birthdays, and if you disagree I don't know what show you've been watching, bisexual skye, celebratingskye, except inasmuch as Coulson would dedicate a million holidays to Skye, not really shippy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2018-04-07 07:07:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4254045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowboatCop/pseuds/RowboatCop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skye's life in snippets of ten birthdays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Candles

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, okay, the timeline on this show is screwy, so just go with me on this.

**April 23, 1992 (3)**

The pictures, six of them, follow her back to St. Agnes inside a homemade scrapbook labeled _Mary Sue’s 3rd Birthday_ in bubbly block letters.

In the first, she’s a serious little girl centered in the shot and contemplating a small, pink-frosted cake.

The second, she looks more excited — more like a small child who sort of understands what birthdays are about. She’s joined by a woman with brown hair twisted into a tight perm, and together they blow out three candles that have been stuck in the cake. It’s clear, even in the still frame, that the woman is the one doing the blowing, while her three-year-old cheeks are just poofed out ridiculously.

Then come three of her opening presents with the woman sitting to the side — an otherwise unfamiliar doll, a dress, a few small books. Nothing that stayed with her long after the pictures were taken, clearly, not long enough to form memories of. She doesn’t know why, wonders if the presents even came back to St. Agnes at all.

In each picture, though, she looks genuinely excited by her treasures.

On the last page of the booklet, the last picture, she cradles her new doll while the woman holds her up, both of them smiling past the camera at whoever was holding it.

The glue holding the pictures to the construction paper finally gives out when she pulls the booklet out the night before her seventeenth birthday, which she spends in a shelter, and the photographs fall into her lap.

It’s a startling realization for her — the fleeting, disappearing, dissolving nature of material things — and she spends her actual birthday at the public library digitizing the few hard copies of pictures and documents she’s managed to collect.

Her third birthday counts as a good memory even if it only exists on paper, then in pixels, and the pictures are precious things.

 

**April 23, 1995 (6)**

It’s the first birthday she has solid memories of.

Of course, they don’t really do birthdays at St. Agnes — there are too many children. Instead, there’s a day set aside every month where all the children with birthdays get a single party. And, she realizes as she gets older, it’s not much of a party.

Still, it doesn’t totally suck.

This year, it takes place on a Saturday near the end of the month, the day before her actual birthday, and she shares the task of blowing out the candles on a large sheet cake with ten other children before it is cut and distributed to everyone.

Before eating the cake, she unwraps an illustrated children’s bible, the same one given to all the children her age as part of the preparations for first communion, full of bible stories told in a large font and small words. She prints her name in careful, though uneven, letters inside the front cover.

It means something, this small present from the nuns. A little thing, even a very generic little thing, that’s just hers, no one else’s. Something she can put her name on.

When she runs, years later, she takes the book. Marked as it is with the wrong name, filled as it is with stories that hold no more meaning for her, it’s still _hers_.

It gets lost somewhere during the move from New York to Austin, and when Miles teases her about missing a children’s _bible_ of all things, she rolls her eyes and plays it off.

After all, it’s nothing really.

But it still hurts to lose something that was _hers_.

 

**April 23, 1998 (9)**

She’s been with the Greens for almost a year when they tell her.

On her birthday.

It’s like a cruel twist of the knife, especially since she has to stay with them for almost a whole month afterwards, finishing third grade with these people who announced they don’t want her _on her birthday_.

Any celebrations, and presents or cakes or blowing out candles, are eclipsed by the tragedy of it.

She liked this family, wanted to stay with them.

It’s only much, much later — later after she learns the truth about the shadow protocol that kept her moving — that she’s able to remember the event differently.

Like, once she goes back through her life and reexamines everything through this lens of SHIELD having saved her, it becomes easy to remember Mrs. Green being sad at having to send her away, to remember her crying because _she didn’t want this either_. She can remember her foster mother standing at the kitchen phone receiving a phone call (not making it) and sharing the news out of shock rather than malice.

It becomes possible to remember this birthday as a tragedy for _everyone_ , not just her. And maybe it’s selfish that she wishes for the Greens to have been hurt, too, but it helps. It helps to remember that she was wanted, that she was maybe even loved.

She likes to think that as an adult she’s able to remember it more like it really happened, even if some small part of her will always believe that it’s just more optimistic.

Still, she holds onto that revised history as hard as she can.

 

**April 23, 2001 (12)**

She breaks into the mother superior’s office because she needs to know more about who she is.

It’s not a new desire by any means. She’s had it for her whole life; everyone in this place has a similar thing. But she’s always been aware that for her it’s more extreme than most. Most of the kids here have some memory or memento, some knowledge of who they were before they were here.

She has nothing like that — literally nothing.

But on her twelfth birthday, she’s just been sent home from _another_ house, another family she could have liked if she’d been with them for longer than two months, and the need is more immediate. She’s got to have something, something to hold onto.

Breaking into the office isn’t anything new for her, not for the better part of two years. She’s good at picking the lock, and she’s rescued many toys and books that the sisters have confiscated as trash, unfit for consumption by good Christian children.

Usually she does it with a lookout, but this is personal, and she goes in alone to search through the filing cabinets in the back room of the office.

Her file folder is light, and holds mostly notices of disciplinary action — sneaking out, having contraband material, the one time she got caught breaking into the office. There are only a few documents actually about her: a birth certificate for Mary Sue Poots dated April 23, 1989, a social security card, and a photocopied set of adoption papers.

The adoption papers should hold the clues to who she is, but there’s not much she can learn from the sea of black — besides the word _redacted_ and the name of a government agency that will determine so much of the course of her life.

Except one thing becomes clear — even though it’s the date on her birth certificate, April 23, 1989 is the date that her adoption papers were stamped with a big red stamp from SHIELD, _not even the day she was dropped here_ . Which means there’s every chance it’s not her birthday. And similarly, there’s no family name of _Poots_ , no family to speak of, which means her name isn’t hers, either.

It’s like everything she’s ever known about herself was just invented, not really her.

In a way, she leaves the headmistress’s office with even less understanding of herself than she had going in. And even at 12, she’s aware that she should be crushed by this — this should be shattering, probably, it should create some sort of crisis.

But really it’s just a relief.

It’s such a relief to know that she’s not the person the nuns say she is. Maybe that means she’s not hell bound, either.

Later, as she’s blowing out the candles with the group who share April birthdays — a group that has changed significantly over the years, except for her — she holds onto this idea that she’s someone different, someone she hasn’t discovered, yet.

Because it’s better to have a mystery, to have an identity that she just doesn’t know, than to be the girl that no one wants.

When she runs away in four more birthdays, she’ll steal the whole folder and digitize it soon after. Long after Mary Sue Poots no longer exists in the wider world, these documents will live on in digitized form — a memento of who she was, or maybe of who she never was.

 

**April 23, 2004 (15)**

She sneaks out the night of her birthday.

Or, well, technically her birthday is over, candles already extinguished on communal cake, by the time she slips out her window and down the tree in the side yard. She’s officially fifteen and officially almost done with an uninspiring freshman year of high school.

But high school isn’t going to teach her how to hack inside a government computer system. High school isn’t going to teach her to find out who she really is and why someone wants to hide that from her. It was always going to be uninspiring.

It’s a Friday, so she’s not the only one breaking out, but she’s definitely the only one that’s going to sneak into the twenty four hour CUNY computer lab just a short walk away.

She’s finally been able to get herself a forged student ID, and with the right makeup and a hat, she can manage to look a few years older than she is — old enough that she hopes she won’t raise any suspicions. The risk is definitely worth it for the promise of broadband internet, a million steps up from the sad little computer room at St. Agnes.

She’s been lurking around some message boards of a group of people who she thinks can help her. It’s an online community of other people looking for answers, other people with questions, other people who have helped her put names to some of her nascent political beliefs.

It’s easy to get inside with her ID, to set herself up at a computer, get around the firewalls and monitoring software, and log onto the Rising Tide message boards. Lately, she feels more at home when she’s able to get on them than she does at any other time; like this nameless, ageless person she becomes online is more real — more _her_ — than she’s allowed to be in the rest of her life.

(The username she’s picked is all about freedom — big, expansive, open — and she doesn’t know yet that it really will become who she is.)

With the help of a few people on the boards, she makes her first real stab at getting into SHIELD. And it doesn’t even matter that she’s not successful. She wasn’t expecting to be successful on her first try, anyways.

What matters is that it starts a new chapter in her life.

The sisters catch her on her way back in, and even though what drives her isn’t teenage rebellion, that’s how they treat her. Like her need to learn more about herself can be punished out of her.

 _God is watching her, God is angry, God will punish her._ It’s stopped meaning anything at this point, their angry God looking down at her. God isn’t real.

 

**April 23, 2007 (18)**

She officially changes her identity on one of the computers in the CUNY lab.

If _illegally_ can mean the same thing as _officially_. (It doesn’t matter to her. The point is that Mary Sue Poots no longer exists.)

It feels momentous, like she’s reclaiming this day — this day that has never _actually_ been her birthday — for herself, for this new self that she’s created.

Afterwards, she treats herself to a slice of chocolate cake from her favorite bakery and walks back to the efficiency she shares with her girlfriend, an actual student she met at CUNY, who makes just enough that she had been covering the rent alone. It’s better — much easier — with two, though, even those months when Skye can’t contribute much.

Jess is a good thing in her life, but Skye is grateful to have tonight to herself, to come to terms with this choice she's made, to enjoy semi-legally being herself. All of this isn’t something she’s felt comfortable sharing, not yet, not with someone she hasn’t even known for a year.

She lights a candle for herself, but instead of blowing it out, she plucks it out of her cake and uses it to set fire to the original copies of Mary Sue Poots's social security card and birth certificate. 

Part of the impetus for making it official ( _getting her affairs in order_ , she might think if she were rich) is the suggestion that she head down to Texas for a few weeks for a job — a chance to make money while helping out some good people. And it’s _good_ money, not that that’s ever been the most important thing, but it's enough to make it possible for her to pay more of her share of things, to make her feel like she's doing enough for Jess, enough to not be a burden.

Plus, it’s Miles Lydon — _the_ Miles Lydon — who invited her on, and its more than a little thrilling, more than a little flattering. They’ve chatted online, helped each other through some complicated hacks, and he thinks they might make good partners.

So she finishes celebrating her birthday by buying a bus ticket and making plans for the trip.

She and Jess don’t last long once the trips to Austin become a regular thing, but it’s an amicable split, and someone she knows in the city who’s willing to offer her a couch from time to time.

 

**April 23, 2010 (21)**

She’s staying in the cheapest hotel in downtown Austin, one she’s pretty familiar with after several years of regular visits, and Miles offers to take her out drinking on 6th street. It’s something they’ve done before — she’s obviously had a good fake ID since she was 18 — but this time feels still different. Special.

As she gets ready, she thinks about Miles in a way she’s never really let herself before.

They’ve known each other for three years, basically — they’ve talked online and met in person a many times in the last few years — but it’s never been anything but friendly. Friendly and professional, though neither she nor Miles are very professional.

She’s been fine with with what they have. More than fine.

Things with Miles are good, even long distance, and it’s the longest she’s ever _really_ known someone. She’s told him things about herself that she’s never felt comfortable sharing with another person before, and he's shared with her, too, in a way that makes her feel like maybe she isn't a burden.

Their relationship is probably the best thing she has going in her life, and she’ll be happy if it only ever stays exactly what it is: something close and comfortable, someone who wants to take care of her, someone who will let her take care of them.

That doesn’t stop her from wanting more, especially lately when her life — divided between New York and Texas, bound up in a lot of semi-legal things — makes it hard to share with other people. Even her loose-knit group in New York, the only reason she’s even had to stay there, is shrinking as people move elsewhere or just move on, as though activism is something for youth, to be put away in adulthood.

Now, as she's considering a move to Texas full time, it’s only natural that she’d start to think of Miles, Miles who is good and sweet and trustworthy, like _that_.

(No matter how good she is at living with disappointment, at adjusting to a life where she rarely gets what she wants, she’s never been able to figure out how to make herself stop wanting things.)

So, she wants. She wants even if she's scared to push things, scared to damage something that's already the best thing in her life.

Fear doesn't stop her from wearing a slinky tank top with tight, faded jeans — cheap vintage finds that will fit perfectly into the crowd on a warm April night and draw an appropriately complimentary reaction from Miles when he picks her up at the hotel. The back of her neck tingles with the promise of what could happen.

They flirt a little — more than usual, even though she’s bad at it when it’s for real — as they walk outside to the bar where Miles has decided they should start.

It takes hours, but they slowly work their way through bars, drinking cheap beer and expensive whiskey until the whole night buzzes around them — from more than just the heavy bass of live music coming out of every third building.

Sometime around one in the morning, they end up behind a club smoking a joint with a couple of college students, dancing to a local band she’s never heard of.

Even later, after sobering up a bit with bottles of water and kimchi tacos from a food truck, he buys her a ridiculously overpriced cupcake from another truck and plucks a single candle out of his pocket. 

She hasn't made a wish in a long time, but she does tonight, and it comes true when Miles presses his lips against hers, a kiss tasting of chocolate buttercream that makes her smile against him, and it feels just as good as she'd hoped it would.

They wind up behind another club making out, which is a lot more romantic in the moment than it seems in retrospect.

He's just so _careful_ with her, checking in as he runs his hands up her top, kissing her like it’s a revelation. He talks a lot, actually, speaks low in her ear, against her neck, about how gorgeous she is and how much he thinks about her, and she’s never felt so desired before.

They’re interrupted by more college students looking for a semi-private place to smoke, and end up stumbling their way back to her hotel around four. She’s sober — or at least _mostly_ sober — when they fall through the door of her shabby little room and knock her duffle bag onto the floor.

They make love until it’s light outside, on a too-springy mattress with rough cotton sheets, but it’s perfect. Maybe the best night of her life. He whispers against her skin that he loves her, that together they can save the world, that he’d do anything for her.

She believes him.

(Of course she doesn’t know, then, that ‘doing anything for her’ will mean taking a million dollars to sell information about a man. She tries not to let it ruin her memories, though, of the first place she ever felt like she truly fit, the first person she wholly confided in, the first person who knew all the bad things about her and still tried to take care of her.)

 

**April 23, 2013 (24)**

She’s on her own in LA, living in her van, and she can't afford nice bakeries and overpriced cupcakes, but she buys the Little Debbie kind and sticks a candle in it because otherwise it would be depressing. 

Actually, it sort of more depressing once she's there, alone in her van, blowing out a candle stuck in junk food. 

Miles calls her to wish her a happy birthday, and they talk briefly. But Skye’s whole life has gotten pretty tied up in chasing after whoever these Centipede people are, and she doesn’t feel comfortable talking about it over the phone. So it’s sort of like she has nothing to say.

It’s sort of like her life is depressing.

Miles definitely gets that impression.

And it’s true, it’s not bar hopping and it’s not making love until dawn.

She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t lonely, but what she’s doing matters. And what she’s doing will — with any luck — lead her to SHIELD and to solving her mystery.

Miles promises that he’ll make it to LA for her twenty fifth birthday, if she can’t make it to Austin. She agrees even though she feels less than certain about what she’ll be doing in one year.

(She’d never have believed it if someone told her that she’d be staying in a cheap motel on her twenty fifth birthday, helping plan to rebuild the very organization she’s set out to bring down.)

 

**April 23, 2015 ~~(26)~~**

She moves a mountain.

 _And_ she’s solved it, all of it, finally. She knows exactly who she is on her twenty sixth birthday.

Of course, it doesn’t count because she knows her _real_ birthday now, and the day comes and goes with no fanfare between another training session, another avalanche, and another quiet, sort of melancholy, lunch in her room.

It’s not actually her birthday so why would she, or anyone, say anything?

Coulson would have said something, she thinks. She hopes. Last year, her birthday had passed amid the crumbling of SHIELD. Still, Coulson remembered, managed to say something. It was comforting last year to know that he cared for her, cared enough to think about her even when the world had stopped making sense, like she was as important to him as SHIELD.

She finds herself hoping that he’s remembering her, now, even though she doesn’t know if SHIELD will ever be a home for her again.

(Even though a part of her wonders if he’s even alive, how he could be alive if SHIELD tried to kill her.)

At Afterlife, though, no one knows that this day holds any significance, and she supposes that to her parents it would hold tragic significance anyways — the anniversary of losing her. The anniversary of her father going insane.

Celebrating it would be cruel.

She wonders if she’ll ever celebrate this day again, if she’s supposed to give it up now that she knows the real one. All her life, she’s wondered about the real one, wondered about who she _really_ is, and now that she knows it’s almost anticlimactic.

It turns out, she’s always just been herself. And she’s not sure she can give up this birthday, this one that’s meant so much to her.

It feels kind of like she’s expected to age a whole year in the span of two months or so, like she’s losing a year of her life.

So she’s not sure how she feels about it, honestly, and there’s too much going on to spend time in deep contemplation.

But she can move a mountain.

 

**July 2, 2015 (27)**

The Playground is basically empty. Fitz and Simmons have been doing their own little dance, May is on vacation with Andrew, Mack has taken his own break, Bobbi and Hunter have left indefinitely while Bobbi recovers.

So when July 2 rolls around, she doesn’t expect anything. Doesn’t say anything.

She’s still not sure how she feels about it, about suddenly being 27. About losing nearly a year of her life.

And then Coulson shows up in her bedroom, dressed in a gray suit with Lola’s keys dangling from his index finger.

“I thought we could take a drive.” He smiles when he says it, easy and relaxed like he hasn’t been since long before he lost his hand. It looks so good on him — a smile like that.

“Yeah?” She grins widely just because he wants to take her with him for Lola’s inaugural drive. “Where to?”

He looks a little pensive for a moment.

“Only if you’re up for it,” he begins, almost an apology, “but before he left, Cal mentioned that you were born on July 2.” She doesn’t even know when her dad and Coulson had a chance to talk. “And I thought maybe you’d like to celebrate. And maybe...see Doctor Winslow.”

She sucks in a breath and lets it out, slowly.

“Yeah,” she finally answers. “I’d like that.”

“After, I’ll buy you lunch,” he promises.

“And cake?”

“And _chocolate_ cake,” he agrees.

She smiles at him, wide and pleased, and then her heart almost stops when he tosses her Lola’s keys.

They end the day at a diner just outside Wisconsin sharing a monstrously huge piece of Grandma Betty’s Old Fashioned Eight Layer Chocolate Cake. Coulson even brought a candle because of course he did.

“How’s it feel to be suddenly 27?”

It’s the first time he's really brought it up today, as though he knows it’s a sensitive topic.

He leans back, signalling that he’s done with the cake and leaving way too much of it to her, but hell if she’s going to let it go to waste.

“Weird,” she answers after another forkful of mostly-frosting. “But good.”

“Good to know the day you were actually born?”

“Yeah,” she answers. “I mean, at first I thought I was losing a year. But after seeing my dad like that, I think maybe I’ve actually gained one. My parents used to be good people, back before everything, and even if I don’t remember it…”

“You had them for a little while.”

Because he understands it, the importance of parents. She knows he does because he radiates it every time he mentions one of his parents, and sometimes when he doesn’t.

“Yeah.”

She’s gained almost a year of her life when she was wanted, when two good people loved her more than anything, when she had a place. Even if she can’t remember it, it feels good to know it’s there in her past.

“I’m glad.”

“And it’s not like I have to lose my other birthday, right?”

“Not if you don’t want to,” he agrees with her. Coulson usually agrees with her.

“April 23 was the day I erased my identity. The day I officially became _just_ Skye.”

“Not _just_ Skye,” he corrects her, smiling as much with his eyes as with his lips, and she can’t remember when she last felt so appreciated, so loved.

She just smiles back, nods.

“It’s the day I became me.”

“Then it’s a day worth celebrating. A birthday you made for yourself.”

“It seems excessive, though, doesn’t it? Having two holidays just for me?”

“No,” he answers, “not too much.” Simple and to the point, smiling and looking so _happy_ just to be sitting across from her, like he would happily celebrate many more holidays dedicated just to her.

The emotion in the air is almost scary, and he’s smiling at her like he did on the quinjet before he dropped her off at The Retreat. Like there’s so much he wants to say, it might all burst out.

“So,” she breaks into the charged silence between them, hoping to get him to open up some more because he seems okay doing that lately, “what were you doing on your 27th birthday?”

She kind of likes it when he’s willing to talk about himself and his past, and whatever the charged silence means, it’s more than she can handle today.

Coulson closes his eyes for a moment, and then a ridiculous smile crosses over his face.

“I had just finished a mission, making contact with a gifted individual.”

“Somewhere fun?”

“Iowa,” he corrects her, smiling wryly and raising an eyebrow. “The other agents took me out drinking at this tiny little country bar where I stuck out like a sore thumb.”

“Because you didn’t own anything but suits back then, either.”

He raises his eyebrows at her in playful warning, but his mouth is curved into an embarrassed smile.

“I was still learning how to blend in,” he defends himself, but shakes his head. “Everyone else had brought jeans.”

She laughs as he continues, as he settles in to tell the story, gently mocking himself and his cultivated middle class identity, and it’s so completely comfortable.

And maybe it wouldn’t seem like the most perfect birthday to someone who hasn’t lived her life. But with Lola’s keys in her pocket and a file folder with ideas for a new SHIELD team — _her own_ SHIELD team, something she can put her name on — she feels a sense of place and purpose.

Today he’s promised her that maybe the two of them (the two of them and the SHIELD they build) can’t save the world, but they can stand up for it. And maybe she belongs here, with him, in a little diner eating too much chocolate cake.

 

 


End file.
